webbbn Posted August 6, 2020 Posted August 6, 2020 Is there any way/plans to support the FrindlyArm RK3399 SOM in Armbian? Does anyone know the hardware well enough to know if another firmware could be loaded on it? It seems to be a very nice module, and the dev board has just about everything one might want on it. On a side note, possibly derailing my own topic, is there any plans to add any of the VPU patches for the RK3399 and associated software? It seems like support for that is getting pretty close, and it would be great if some of the patches that are floating around could get include in the official distro. I'm about to dive in an try getting at least accelerated ffmpeg working on my M4V2 and/or neo4, but have been hoping that it would get into the standard distro first. :-)
Werner Posted August 6, 2020 Posted August 6, 2020 There are no plans for that AFAIK. If you want to speed things up make yourself familiar with the build tools and start tinkering. Armbian is relying heavily on community and manufacturer contributions for new board support. At least it is a known SoC which should not be that bad...
webbbn Posted August 6, 2020 Author Posted August 6, 2020 I am plenty familiar with the build tools, but not so much with bringing up a new board. To quote a Donald Rumsfeld phrase, there are alot of "unknown unknowns". I suppose I could try booting a similar image and see what happens...
piter75 Posted August 6, 2020 Posted August 6, 2020 4 hours ago, webbbn said: I suppose I could try booting a similar image and see what happens... Looking at the device tree differences between SOM RK3399v2 and M4v2 I would say the possibility of booting SOM (v2) with M4v2 image is pretty high but... you never know until you try.
webbbn Posted August 6, 2020 Author Posted August 6, 2020 Well, what do you know, it works! At the very least, ethernet, wifi, and hdmi work. I don't know what else to test on it ATM. I plan to try an NVME drive, but that's still in the mail, and I'm curious if USB-C display will work. One thing that interested me about this board/module was it's advertised ability to work with just a USB-C cable. It could be a really interesting board in that respect.
webbbn Posted August 6, 2020 Author Posted August 6, 2020 I forgot it had built-in emmc. That works perfectly as well.
Werner Posted August 7, 2020 Posted August 7, 2020 7 hours ago, webbbn said: Well, what do you know, it works! At the very least, ethernet, wifi, and hdmi work. I don't know what else to test on it ATM. I plan to try an NVME drive, but that's still in the mail, and I'm curious if USB-C display will work. One thing that interested me about this board/module was it's advertised ability to work with just a USB-C cable. It could be a really interesting board in that respect. This is great news. If you can simply try further features of the board and report if they work or not with the m4v2 image. If somebody finds time initial support for this board can be added by simply copy paste.
webbbn Posted August 7, 2020 Author Posted August 7, 2020 It appears that the USB ports are not working. Is there something in the device tree that enables them, or enables the power for them? It doesn't seem like anything happens when I insert a card, but I don't see anything in the schematic that would control power to them, other than the over current protection chip.
Werner Posted August 7, 2020 Posted August 7, 2020 The easiest way is probably trying to extract the device tree from an official friendlyelec image and compare those.
webbbn Posted August 7, 2020 Author Posted August 7, 2020 USB turned out to be a hardware issue. I booted a FA image, and USB didn't work there either, so I re-seated the module and USB is now working perfectly.
NicoD Posted August 7, 2020 Posted August 7, 2020 3 minutes ago, webbbn said: USB turned out to be a hardware issue. I booted a FA image, and USB didn't work there either, so I re-seated the module and USB is now working perfectly. hardware issue -> human error 1
webbbn Posted August 7, 2020 Author Posted August 7, 2020 This may also be "human error", but the USB-C is not working, at least not the same as with the FA image. With the FA image, I can plug a USB C "hub" with HDMI, ethernet, USB, etc, and it powers up during boot and works as expected, which is very nice. With the armbian image it does power up at all. I believe the M4V2 only uses USB C for power, so I don't think think it has an equivalent of this, and I don't know where to look for how to enable it. Might there be a kernel configuration? The schematic shows a vbus detection line, power control, and some sort of interface IC (FUSB302MPX).
webbbn Posted August 8, 2020 Author Posted August 8, 2020 I can also confirm that NVME works perfectly, which I expected, since it works on the m4v2.
Werner Posted August 8, 2020 Posted August 8, 2020 Maybe @piter75 finds time to add this board as CSC by simply copy/paste the m4v2 to have something others can try too?
piter75 Posted August 8, 2020 Posted August 8, 2020 On 8/7/2020 at 10:51 PM, webbbn said: With the armbian image it does power up at all. Is it with legacy or current/dev? Legacy should probably work as it is based on FA kernel code directly and DTS differences between the two boards are minimal. With current/dev it might be a whole different story though... 12 hours ago, Werner said: Maybe @piter75 finds time to add this board as CSC I can do that in the "mean time" ;-)
webbbn Posted August 9, 2020 Author Posted August 9, 2020 I'm building the latest version of current, so it is understandable that it doesn't work. Are there any RK3399 boards where USB-C works with Armbian mainline? It looks like the Firefly has a similar USB-C port, but I don't know if that works with Armbian either.
piter75 Posted August 10, 2020 Posted August 10, 2020 On 8/9/2020 at 2:26 AM, webbbn said: Are there any RK3399 boards where USB-C works with Armbian mainline? AFAIK it is non functional yet... Did you test your RK3399V2 SOM for stability in mainline? M4V2 has some known stability issues that I currently attribute (maybe wrongly) to memory / design used. RK3399V2 SOM uses the same RAM chips and I wonder if it shares the same issues.
webbbn Posted August 10, 2020 Author Posted August 10, 2020 I haven't used it extensively yet, but I have worked on it a bit, and it has been up several days with no issues. Is there s stress test that I could run?
piter75 Posted August 11, 2020 Posted August 11, 2020 16 hours ago, webbbn said: Is there s stress test that I could run? For me it usually takes no more than few hours of memtester (apt install memtester) running to see first failures with M4V2 in mainline. You can run it this way as root (for 4GB board). For 2GB the value of memory reservation for testing should be lower. memtester 3280M 2>&1 | tee memtester.log
webbbn Posted August 11, 2020 Author Posted August 11, 2020 I ran a 12 hour stress run last night without issues, other than forcing me to put a better fan on the heatsink! :-) I've been running memtester for about 10 hours now without issue.
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